


To Mycenae

by rexluscus



Category: Master and Commander - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: Age of Sail, Bad Scottish accents, Cackling French villains, Historical Homophobia, M/M, Nineteenth-century science nerdery, Pre-Slash, Pretending to Be Gay, Sailing nerdery, Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-04
Updated: 2011-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-21 00:31:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rexluscus/pseuds/rexluscus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which new friends are made, science is advanced, and Jack and Stephen pretend to be Scotsmen. Set shortly after _HMS Surprise_.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Mycenae

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maenad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maenad/gifts).



> Many thanks to schemingreader and concertigrossi for their help. And thanks to Maenad for a great prompt, without which this story wouldn't have been written, and to the organizers of Yuletide 2008!

"Maturin? Doctor Maturin?"

Stephen's stride paused, and he allowed himself to turn toward the reedy voice that had called his name in the middle of the street, making no effort to conceal his icy displeasure.

His accoster was unperturbed. He was an anaemic, red-nosed Scot in a shabby yellow stuff suit, and Stephen didn't recognise him at first. The Royal Society was populated by such creatures—for that was certainly where the acquaintance had originated—and Stephen prepared himself for an uninteresting effusion on his most recent osteological lecture on the Greater Crested Tern.

"Gillespie," the man supplied with an ingenuous and gap-toothed smile. "Six months ago, at Lady Banks'—when Tramezzani sang a most pleasing selection from  _Iphigénie en Tauride_. You remarked upon the clear and moving expression of despair the gentleman achieved."

This brought the evening back in an unpleasant series of still pictures, largely blurred. Stephen had, at the time, been deep in a spell of opiated gloom in which all associations returned to one ringing theme; the cries of Orestes in that masterpiece by Gluck had formed one note, at it were, of a lament sung by his vital spirits, over and over in an endless droning figure. Little wonder Mr Gillespie's face had failed to make much of an impression. Since then, Stephen had woken from that sad dream, and so he put on what he intended to be an apologetic smile and took Gillespie's hand. "Of course. You are the author of some recent nimble remarks on magnetism, I believe."

"Good of you to recall, sir!" Gillespie beamed with such effulgence that Stephen might just have presented him with a Copley Medal rather than a dim awareness of his existence. "My work has taken an exciting turn in recent months, if I may say; I am close to a major breakthrough on the poor marine compass."

This news illuminated two possible courses of action. When Gillespie had stopped him in the street, Stephen had been on his way to dinner with Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy; and while much of what Jack said in the naval line touched Stephen's mind with all the crashing ephemerality of waves on a strand, he was mindful of one particular refrain: the inadequacy of the standard Admiralty compass. Any seaman-like captain kept his own azimuth compass close to hand, but even then, Jack had complained many times, a ship invariably produced as many bearings as it had compasses. Why didn't his Royal Society address this? To which Stephen replied that many minds were in fact employed in doing so, but it was a thorny question complicated not least by magnetic variation on the surface of the Earth—or so he was given to understand. Since Stephen's interests leaned more toward the biological than the mineral, he hadn't been able to satisfy Jack further on the subject, but producing Gillespie would certainly repair this insufficiency. 

This was the first option. The second was to leave Gillespie standing where Stephen had found him; the _Surprise_  was putting to sea within the week, and Stephen would shortly have his fill of dinner conversations on subjects of naval minutiae that largely excluded him. 

After a moment of deliberation, his affection for his friend won, and he said, "I am engaged for a turbot and a saddle of mutton at Fladong's, if you'd care to accompany me." A look of ravenous hope crossed Gillespie's face, though whether in reaction to the promise of august company in Nelson's and Collingwood's old haunt or the possibility of a turbot, Stephen couldn't tell.

"You're too kind by far." Gillespie's watery grey eyes darted from one side of the street to the other. "I have, however, agreed to meet my partner at Jonathan's."

Stephen thought of that cheerless coffee-house adjacent to the Royal Exchange crammed with stock-jobbers and other scrubs without sensibility or intellect, and said, "You must send for him, then. He is also a student of magnetism?"

"Of a sort; he is a maker of scientific and mathematical instruments. It is he who is rendering my equations in extended space, as it were..."

"Indeed." A vivid picture of Jack Aubrey among his lenses and mirrors, grinding away with his finest polishing sludge, sprang to Stephen's mind. "Your friend is not very well acquainted with telescopes, is he?"

Mr Turnbull—for this was the name of the Aberdeen instrument-maker who turned up at their table not long after Stephen and Gillespie had joined Jack for the turbot—knew a great deal about telescopes. He knew even more about octants—had made the artificial horizon his special cause—had perfected Smerson's whirling speculum as far as it could be perfected—had, in fact, been dedicated body and soul to the finding of altitudes at sea until Mr Gillespie had brought the dire situation of the marine compass to his attention. Stephen sat apart and sipped his claret, pleased at the success of his little symposium. 

A stranger would have remarked on Turnbull's striking similarity to Jack—the big frame with its simian disproportion in the arms, the florid face, the thatch of ginger straw woven into a rigid queue—but closer examination of the heavy brow and thin, inverted bracket of a mouth revealed a Boeotian glumness with no resemblance to Jack's voluble spirit. At a distance, they could be brothers; up close, they were mere strangers with a mutual affinity for navigation. Turnbull and Gillespie formed the truer pair, harmonious in their heterogeneity, like a perfect major third. When one spoke, the other completed the thought, with no sense of competition or interruption. Stephen had sat with them an hour before it dawned on him that they were sodomites. He was not so naïve as to think that any human relationship could be free of strife and misunderstanding, but from where he was sitting, this one seemed ideal—a fraternity founded on science. That a man might not have to go outside such a union to meet the rest of his needs seemed the very apotheosis of sociality. The ancients had thought it so. Stephen did not share the misogyny of Socrates, but he did see that relations with women, however affectionate, would always be tainted by the slave's resentment of the master.

"We are sadly mindful of Mr Knight's chief error," said Gillespie, noting the emptiness of Turnbull's wine glass and refilling it without apparent conscious awareness. "I mean, of course, his failure to test his instruments at sea."

Jack's brilliant smile broke out, and his frame expanded with relief. "Now that you say so, I am free to admit it was a peculiar thing, the way the Admiralty bought up all those compasses without ever seeing how they fared in a seaway. I don't like to speak without knowing the whole story, but Mr Knight must have had uncommon interest at Whitehall."

"Indeed." Gillespie pursed his lips. "Money and influence, to make up for the fact that as a scientist, he lacked a most basic capacity: that of recognising when his theories had bumped up against reality."

"We're not seagoing men ourselves," said Turnbull, "and so our instruments haven't been tested much beyond the Holyhead packet. What we wouldn't give for a good long sea voyage."

"But surely," put in Stephen, "the length of the voyage should account for little, if you are merely concerned with such variables as the ship's motion acting upon the needle?"

"It is important to test the device across a wide range of latitudes," Gillespie explained, "magnetic variation being the principle plague that bedevils us."

"Ah, just so," said Stephen, feeling a little silly. "Of course I had forgotten it."

"We've petitioned the Admiralty to give us a vessel," Turnbull went on, "or to send our instruments to sea with one of their captains, but apparently one needs Sir Joseph Banks' patronage to get anything at all out of the Admiralty, and we've not had luck drawing his attention to our work."

"He lies to protect me," Gillespie interrupted in a loud whisper. "The fact is that I offended Sir Joseph some years ago on a purely personal matter, and he won't give me the time of day."

"Jack," said Stephen, still struggling with his discomfort in a conversation about a scientific subject on which he was less than fully informed, "you have been known to take on passengers from time to time, have you not?"

Jack frowned a little—it was not at all proper of Stephen to offer Jack's services in such a way, or rather to offer the services of the Navy—but he was too obliging and too intrigued by the promise of a better compass to say otherwise than: "Of a time, yes."

"Oh, what a boon it would be, sir!" Gillespie clasped his hands. "How we would honour you for it!"

"Perhaps you'd even permit us to name the device for you," Turnbull added, his great phlegmatic spirit rousing somewhat in the heat of his partner's excitement. "That is, if it were a success."

Jack was used to this sort of thing; a veritable queue of scientific discoveries to which he had lent his name trailed after him. But he did not have the kind of soul that ever grew inured to compliments. His smile widened. "That would be fine! I must speak to the Admiral first, of course, and you must live without knowing your destination, but should you join us at the Nore in a week, I can promise you latitudes to spare." A look of concentration crossed his face, and Stephen was positive that he was searching for a witticism relating quantities to latitudes; but it seemed there were metaphors even Jack Aubrey would not mix.

*

Ever since the Nore light, red and toy-like on the great grey stretch of the Estuary, had dropped beneath their stern, Jack had felt a curious easing in his chest, as though a weight he'd not been aware he'd been carrying had suddenly been removed. As the  _Surprise_  wove her way through the squadron in the Downs, rolling under the force of her signal guns, that diffuse pressure lifted a little more, until when they'd beaten out into the Channel far enough that they'd sunk the land entirely, it lifted once and for all. The gale freshened from the north-west; Jack set his jibs and topsails, single-reefed, and breathed easily for the first time in weeks. It had nothing to do with his creditors, or his wife's pregnancy; it was merely, as Stephen might have it, the freedom of a creature in its natural environment. 

On the lee side of the quarterdeck, Stephen lingered with the two instrument-men, watching with an ethnographer's curiosity as Turnbull took a lunar sight. This ritual had never seemed to fascinate Stephen before. His Royal Society friends had evidently transformed it, making intelligible what he was previously determined to consider an opaque seaman's custom. Jack thought for a moment about transposition; Stephen was humming something in G, a major-key tune that nevertheless suggested melancholy, and it made an odd sort of harmony with the shriek of the rigging, which was tuned somewhat higher. Stephen had been in Jack's peripheral vision all afternoon, perilously so at times as he wandered in his lubberly daze through the commotion of putting to sea. Mercifully, no accidents had occurred; even the compass-makers had made it aboard without harm, and neither of them were ill, at least not yet. It might be a different story once it came on to blow, and the glass was dropping vertiginously. Tom Pullings had already struck topgallant masts down on deck and was ordering the guns double-breeched, manoeuvring around the three scientists as though they were natural outcroppings. 

Once the Scots had gone below, Jack stepped over to the lee rail. "What say you to a bit of music?" he asked Stephen, turning his face into the wind and listening to its pitch in his ears. The blow was still a ways off. "I have a sudden yearning for Gluck."

"Then fortune has found you," said Stephen. "I have just finished an arrangement this morning of one of Orestes' arias."

"That's it!" Jack clutched his forehead. "Stephen, it has been clawing at the back of my mind all day, that tune you have been humming—of course, it is from  _Iphigénie_. Damn me for not smoking it sooner. You know how the mind works, busy with one thing while tangled up in something else without you're even aware of it. Shall we have at this arrangement of yours? I'm eager to drive it from my mind now."

"We shall do so without delay."

They had barely tuned their instruments and settled into their chairs, indeed Jack had had barely a chance to examine the first phrase on the page in Stephen's tight, slanted hand, when there was a cry of "Sail!" from the masthead. Jack set his fiddle aside. He didn't wait for the report from the lookout but scurried into the tops with his glass to find Mr Pullings already crouched there, his own glass clapped on the horizon.

"She's not one of our own home-bound, sir," said Pullings.

"Indeed not." She much more closely resembled a privateer out of Calais or Boulogne, with her fast lines and barque-rig. "Clear for action, if you please," Jack said, and collapsed his glass briskly. A light thrill ran through him. The Frenchman was sailing an easy two points free, and for the moment, she was oblivious to him. 

Pullings barely needed to give the order before the men were at their stations. As the lower decks filled with noise and activity, Turnbull and Gillespie drifted up from below, as though they had been chaff stirred from between the bulkheads, furniture and casks of provisions that were now making their way into the hold. 

Jack noticed them lingering by the break in the quarterdeck for several minutes, looking anxious, before Stephen was suddenly at his side. "The gentlemen from Aberdeen's compliments, but they were wondering if they can expect their papers, tools, prototypes and other delicate personal effects to be handled in this manner every time a strange sail is spotted."

Jack battled momentary annoyance. Stephen was inclined to treat ships of war as though they were a private conveyance for his scientific specimens, but Jack tolerated all sorts of behaviour in Stephen that he never countenanced in anyone else. His irritation slackened when he realised with a look at the scientists that Stephen had pled their cause without their permission.

"Gentlemen, my apologies," he said. "I shall be sure my steward personally attends to your belongings in the future. Tell me, was anything damaged?" He always felt the greatest regret when Stephen's preserving spirits made their way down the gullet of a seaman or his live specimens ended up in the midshipmen's mess, but in this case, he was invested; he longed passionately for some advance in marine compass design.

The Frenchman had spotted the  _Surprise_  and was now coming about, so that Jack was not entirely attending to Gillespie's "Oh, no, Captain, it's quite all right"—he was instead watching with pleasure as the French ship hesitated in her stays, tacks and sheets flapping as her people scurried around. The sky to the southwest was darkening and a heavy southerly swell was pushing the  _Surprise_ 's head deep into the waves as she cracked on, but these were the conditions that showed her best, her supreme stiffness and weatherliness even in the heaviest of seas. He ordered light hawsers to the mastheads and the reef shaken out of her topsails. As the blow came on harder, she would only fly faster, while the Frenchman would find his admittedly fine craft more and more difficult to handle. It would be a matter of a few hours at most.

They crossed the Frenchman's wake, and Jack gave the order to come about. Gillespie and Turnbull reappeared suddenly amid the thundering of feet, wearing twin expressions of excitement. "Gentlemen!" Jack called to them over the roar of the sea as the  _Surprise_  pitched into a deep trough. "I dare say this is your moment!"

"Indeed, Captain!" replied Gillespie with a look of ecstasy. "A change of heading is a momentous occasion for us!"

Stephen was watching suspiciously as the Scotsmen fiddled with their instrument. "I fail to see why this should be the case," he said. "Surely a compass is still a fixed point in space regardless of the heading of the ship that bears it."

"So it is, Doctor," said Turnbull, displaying the beautiful brass dial in his large palm, "but what you do not recognise is that a ship has its own magnetic polarity, owing to the quantities of iron aboard. The Earth acts upon her like a great lodestone, and she becomes magnetised from stem to stern."

"Producing an effect upon the compass known as deviation," Gillespie continued. "But once the Captain has brought the ship about, we may calculate that deviation and thus determine our true bearing! Minus declination, of course."

"Then I give you joy of it," Stephen smiled, and bent to examine the jerking needle. 

The dark grey line of clouds had advanced alarmingly during their conversation. By the turn of the watch, it was quite dark, and they had gained half a mile on their chase. Jack's assessment of the French captain's seamanship had been premature; he was coaxing a great deal of speed out of his ship now, and although the  _Surprise_  was regularly running ten knots off the reel, they were not overtaking her at nearly the rate Jack would have liked. It seemed likely she would soon carry away a spar, which would end the chase quickly, presuming the  _Surprise_  did not do so as well; but Jack knew his ship's limits. He paced the quarterdeck impatiently, watching the Frenchman's masts, and listened to the scientists explaining their motions to Stephen.

"Do you mean to say that it renders a different bearing depending on where it is placed in the ship?" Stephen glared at the instrument with real animosity. "This, the device that our lives all depend on? Is it truly so unreliable?"

Gillespie laughed. "Now at last you begin to appreciate the need for its improvement! Come, let us bear it over by that cannon."

For another hour, Jack divided his attention between the Frenchman drawing closer and the scientists wandering through every quarter of the ship, scribbling notes and answering Stephen's intermittent queries. It had evidently dawned on Stephen what a pitiable object a compass truly was, buffeted from all sides by magnetic vicissitudes, and his sudden and violent devotion to the project seemed to spring directly out of personal indignation. At two bells, Jack went below to examine a seam that had the carpenter greatly concerned. It occupied him for no longer than five minutes, but as he was returning to the deck, he ran into a excited Mr Babbington.

"Sir, the chase has carried away her topsail. Also, the doctor is on the forecastle with the compass-makers and refuses to come down, for all that we plead they will be swept overboard."

Jack dashed up the ladder and bounded out onto the main deck. Off the bow, the labouring Frenchman loomed suddenly close; through the spray, he could just make out the men in her tops frantically fishing the sprung yard and setting a new sail. "Run out the chasers, Mr Babbington," he called. "Doctor Maturin! I am ordering you below!"

Two things happened at once. First, the foretop stay parted with a loud crack, and immediately the ship fell off as the helmsman put her before the wind. At the same moment, the sea surged over the bows and swept down the forecastle in a heavy flood, dragging at the men clinging to their lifelines. The compass-men were secure in the grasp of two burly topmen, but Stephen, who had only just turned toward Jack with an angry retort in his mouth, lost his purchase and stumbled into the bulwark, where he struggled like an upended beetle for a moment before disappearing over the side.

Jack glanced in anguish from the groaning topmast to the spot where his friend had been standing. It was perhaps the shock of two mishaps falling in such quick succession that kept him from clapping on a line, but whatever it was that had caused him to lose his head, there was nothing securing him when he rushed to the rail to keep Stephen in sight, nothing to prevent a second wave coming aboard just as the _Surprise_  struck the bottom of a roll from sweeping him into the sea as well.

There was the sudden shocking loss of orientation as he entered the crashing cold. He struggled out of his coat and boots, and swam toward the figure whose pale face disappeared and reappeared in the dark ahead. Stephen was conscious and gasping when Jack reached his side, but went under as a swell lifted them up and flung them back down. The side of a ship loomed, and Jack knew that it could not possibly be  _his_  ship, but then another swell sent him violently colliding with it, propelled by Stephen's dead weight. After that, he knew nothing. 

*

"Brother, awake." 

A hand on Jack's shoulder rolled his recumbent bulk gently to and fro. He snuffled into a fragrant mass of hay, yawned, lifted his head, and looked immediately into Stephen's pale, unblinking eyes. 

"You have been delirious," said Stephen, studying his pupils intently in the low light. "You have a prodigious knot on your head and a badly sprained ankle, I am afraid. Please to satisfy me as to the year, and the name of the current monarch?"

"My head is fine," said Jack, rubbing the knot cautiously. "Quite ship-shape." He sat up and shook the hay from his hair and body like a horse getting to its feet. "Good heavens, where are we?"

"We are in a cow shed some two to three miles outside Wimereux, under guard. Our captors are out of earshot for the present moment, though not removed too far off; that is why we must organise ourselves quickly. We are prisoners of the local gendarmerie, to whom that charitable privateer delivered us. Now, listen closely. French agents have undoubtedly supplied them with descriptions of every man travelling aboard the  _Surprise_ , and it is imperative that we not appear to be ourselves."

Jack rubbed his hands together and breathed a cloud of moist air onto his fingers. Someone had dressed him in a sailor's frock during the ill-defined period that he'd been unconscious, and Stephen was wrapped in a thin coat. They were both wearing shoes donated by men of differing sizes; Jack's pinched horribly, and Stephen's were comically large. No man would ever mistake them to be officers of the Royal Navy, certainly.

"I don't mean to gainsay you," said Jack, "but just a week ago, you said you were quite sure the men who had compromised you were dead."

"Very well, then," replied Stephen in a harsh whisper, "let me represent the situation to you as clearly as I can. If we are civilians, we shall in all likelihood be marched to Valenciennes and left to our own devices under parole. If we are officers of the Navy, we shall be borne to Verdun where the commandant will watch us like a hawk, and if one of us should happen to be suspected of spying, we shall vanish into the Temple with not even a rumour to mark our passing." Stephen paused for a moment, listening. Satisfied they were still alone, he continued. "My recommendation is that for the foreseeable future, we become Mssrs Turnbull and Gillespie of Aberdeen, scientists. We resemble them closely enough to anyone who has never met us, and if we can break free from these officious young men, we stand a good chance of reaching the cartel ship at Calais. Our chances decrease considerably if instead we are thrown into a coach bound for Paris and delivered into the hands of the secret police. Would you not agree?"

"To be sure." Jack was already considering the tides in Calais Harbour. "You know your way around this countryside, I dare say?"

"Tolerably well; we shall make do. We need only await, or attempt to create, an opportunity to slip away. They will not suspect Turnbull and Gillespie of much derring-do, I think, provided we are convincing. Which leads me to my next remark: I fear that to maintain the illusion, we shall have to discuss our profession—something I believe you may authentically do, but not I."

Jack nodded. In matters of verbal deception, he was far more confident in Stephen's abilities than his own, but it would be no great matter as long as all that was required of him was to rattle on about compass design. "We ought both to pretend to be ignorant of French," he thought aloud, "but what shall you do if they question you closely in English?"

The bolt across the outside of the barn door lifted, and before Stephen could answer Jack, they found themselves in the company of two smug young gendarmes.

" _Enfin vous êtes éveillé,_ " said one of them. " _Bon._  Now, your names, if you please?"

"Hubert Gillespie,  _mo'sieu,_ " said Stephen with a deferential bow.

"Your profession?"

"Phesickal sceyance."

The man narrowed his eyes. " _Répétez?_ "

Stephen sighed delicately. "Phesickal. Sceyance."

The gendarme turned to his colleague. " _Çela, ce n'est pas Anglais!_ " he cried. The other gendarme merely shrugged. "Place of birth?" he asked.

"The Baurders,  _mo'sieu,_ " burred Stephen, "fae the wee toon a' Eyemoot'."

The gendarmes glanced irritably at Jack. "Please ask your friend to speak English," said one of them.

"Afraid that's the best 'e can doo," said Jack, struggling to affect his own, less ludicrous Scots dialect.

"And your name?"

"Turnbull, sir, from Aberdeen, also in the  _sceyantific_  line. Navigational instruments an' the leyk."

" _Ah, oui._ " One of the gendarmes produced a sheet of paper and showed it to his colleague, running his finger down the margin. "Turnbull  _et_  Gillespie.  _Les sodomites._ " 

"Meynd yair toong,  _mo'sieu!_ " cried Stephen suddenly, startling Jack, who had momentarily forgotten to react. He had sussed that Mr Turnbull was being accused of buggery, but he had forgotten that  _he_  was meant to be Turnbull as he recalled how the compass-men were apt to finish one another's sentences, how alert they were to each other's needs, and more to the point, how impatient they had been to flee England. All of that business about a personal insult—how obvious it was in retrospect, how idiotic of him to have missed it.

It then occurred to him that any reasonable man, sodomite or not, was expected to deny a charge of buggery, and that for this performance at least he was playing the part of the maligned Mr Turnbull. Recovering himself, he rumbled, "Luke here, ye puir greet bastirt!"—summoning the spirit of an old shipmate from Durness whose passionate, musical, unintelligible orders had thrown the ship into confusion more than once. "Ah'll skelp ye streeght in the puss!" Stephen stared at him, and sensing he was coming it a bit broad, he snapped his mouth shut.

The gendarmes glanced at each other and smiled. All at once Jack felt the throbbing in his head, and he sat sullenly, disappointed in the extreme with his performance. He was used to the play-acting one did at sea, with false colours and a disguised ship and perhaps a crewman versed in a foreign language, but he'd never had to deceive someone from a distance closer than pistolshot. This was Stephen's area of expertise, not his own, and he was ready for the gendarmes to move off again so they could get back to planning their escape.

" _Le premier consul_  does not care if you are sodomites or not," said the gendarme with an unctuous smirk. "He only cares that you are English subjects in France. You are under arrest, of course. You shall be interned at Valenciennes; we shall set out at dawn. Sleep well, gentlemen." The Frenchmen withdrew.

"Well," said Jack with a sigh after a long silence had passed, "at least they're not much interested in compasses, eh?"

*

As he sat in his bed of hay watching his breath form little blue clouds in the dim light, Stephen felt the urge to hum Orestes' aria, but he did not think Jack would take it well. Like Orestes, Stephen had doomed not only himself but his friend— _je t'ai donné la mort_ , the wretched man sang, and it ate at Stephen while his rational mind busied itself with the details of their escape. He had hoped that his recent voyage to East India in the capacity of a naval surgeon would erase any notions in the French intelligence services that one Doctor Maturin, physician and expert on the anatomy of  _Pezophaps solitarius_ , might be associated with espionage, but a hurried and necessarily cryptic message from Sir Joseph Blaine shortly before the  _Surprise_  had sailed had renewed his anxieties. It did not set him any more at ease that Jack was a well-known nuisance to the French Navy, and while he did not truly fear for Jack's life should their identities be discovered, he also held no hope for his freedom. The gendarmerie would guard him like a cask of bullion, and at best, they would languish in captivity with the other English  _détenus_  long before they could escape or bribe their way home. At worst, Jack would spend the remainder of the war under lock and key, and Stephen would be bundled off to the Temple or simply executed in a ditch, depending on whose hands he fell into. Their little deception had to succeed, if only because Stephen could not bear to be the author of his friend's downfall.

In the morning, the mistress of the farm whose shed they had slept in fed them fresh eggs, then outfitted them with scarves, stockings, and a number of other worn woollen scraps. Stephen remembered not to thank her in French, and then he and Jack were herded out onto the main road. They were to walk all the way to Valenciennes, it seemed, driven along like dogs by the mounted gendarmes, and dependent upon charity for their supper the whole way. Stephen had no intention of reaching Valenciennes, of course. They were close to Calais now, and the sooner they could break away from their captors, the less time they would spend walking away from their destination. Jack's ankle would not bear much, for one thing, and their flight to Calais would undoubtedly be through fields, marshes and ditches since they would be avoiding the road. There was no guarantee once they reached Calais that the cartel ship would even be in port, but Stephen did his best not to dwell on it.

Jack strode through the crystalline morning air looking far more robust than he no doubt felt, although his face was the colour of new cheese; he was trying not to limp, and he gave Stephen a frequent and oddly artificial smile that at first seemed inexplicable. All became clear somewhat later, when he flung an arm around Stephen's shoulders as they walked.

"Your ankle troubles you, I take it?" asked Stephen, overwhelmed by Jack's sudden and fragrantly masculine proximity.

"We are intended to be sodomites, are we not?" muttered Jack, holding his face in a rictus as though he were attempting ventriloquy. 

"I do not think the act need be carried quite so far," Stephen replied, though he reciprocated with a hesitant arm around Jack's capacious waist. 

"Nonsense," said Jack. "We ought to throw ourselves into the role, if we are going to play it. Nothing is ever won without boldness."

"Another of your Nelsonian sentiments, to be sure." Stephen ventured a glance over his shoulder at the trailing gendarmes to see if their display was having any effect. "Nevertheless, you may be right." To Jack's cheek, he delivered an ostentatious kiss.

They walked along for a while, still in their half-embrace, stunned into embarrassed silence. At last, Jack's eyes crinkled at the corners. "Upon my word, Stephen," he said, "I doubt I shall have the nerve to relate this particular adventure when we return home."

"It is no more humiliating to pretend to sodomy than it is to dress as a performing bear, is it?"

Jack's expression, full of suppressed laughter, grew pensive. "No, I suppose not. Still, I would rest easier if you did not mention it to Sophie."

"I wouldn't dream of it, joy," Stephen replied. Behind them, one of the gendarmes snickered, and Stephen's spirits lightened. He was certainly relieved that their play-acting was meeting with success, but in truth, the greatest cause of his pleasure was that Jack did not seem angry with him for getting them into this lamentable fix.

By evening, they had made it as far as Le Wast, where another farmer's wife took pity on them and they found themselves once more bedded down with the livestock. 

"These young men haven't the patience to watch us every moment of the day and night," Stephen observed in a whisper as they ate their supper of bread and beer. "I predict that we shall have an opportunity to get away tonight; we need only be alert to it."

"Perhaps we could beg them for a bit of privacy," said Jack, face brightening with cunning. "You know, of a conjugal nature."

"Brother, you are taking to this sodomy business with remarkable good humour," Stephen observed, amused.

"You know there is little I would not do to wipe these Frenchmen's eye," Jack replied gravely, but his mouth twitched with laughter.

Near midnight, their captors burst in and forced them to their feet. Stephen had been dozing, but he grew instantly alert, suspecting that their moment had come. His suspicions grew when the gendarmes marched them into the village and ordered them into the cellar of a tavern.

"I think these blackguards mean to play cards all night," said Jack with glee. "See if you can't produce a light, would you? I'm going to have a look at this lock."

Jack made little progress with the lock, which was a surprisingly sturdy one for such a rustic establishment. Then, after an hour, the door opened suddenly and the landlord came down the steps. Jack seized him round the throat and Stephen set about gagging him with one of their woollen scarves.

"I apologise for this profusely, my dear sir," he muttered as he and Jack tied the poor man's wrists and ankles with twine. "You should be discovered by morning, if not well before." Then they fled the building and ran northward out of town without exchanging a word.

It took three days and three cold, uncomfortable nights for them to reach Calais, traversing the farm-strewn countryside and slowed at every step by Jack's injured ankle. If they were pursued, they never learned of it. By the time they reached the outskirts of Calais, Jack was grey-faced and silent, focusing all of his reserves into merely remaining upright; and both of them were ravenously, unspeakably hungry. Stephen at least was used to some privation, but Jack, for all his physical hardihood, had a stomach with which there was no negotiating. A loaf of bread stolen off a sill had supported them somewhat, but they hadn't dared to reveal themselves to the people whose country they were passing through.

Now, they made their way to the west pier and discovered with intense dismay that the cartel was nowhere to be seen.

"It's these damn northwesterlies," said Jack, his voice rough with exhaustion. "There's no getting into the harbour with 'em, and they blow without cease this time of year."

After they had crouched for a while in silence, too amazed by their misfortune to act for a time, Jack said, "It is possible she is moored further down the coast. There is an anchorage in which vessels often wait for the tide..." 

He broke off with such uncharacteristic weariness that Stephen's heart clenched, and his guilt returned; he had managed to forget for a while that he was responsible for his friend's suffering.  _Ami fidèle et rare_ , he thought in the voice of Orestes, and mourned. Nevertheless, he said, "We must press on, then. Come, my dear, I shall help you to your feet."

They must have made a spectacle, two shabby figures stumbling along the edge of town with the larger leaning incongruously upon the smaller. The going became even more difficult when they reached the dunes of fine sand that stretched down the coast south of town. They walked on; but they had nearly reached Sangatte without any sign of a ship.

Stephen had only just registered the sound of hoofbeats behind them before a voice barked, " _Arrêtez!_ "

They turned to face the young gendarme who sat astride his horse, pointing a pistol. "You were very clever," he said, eyes narrow and inhuman, "but you were stupid enough to escape by a most obvious route. Do you think we are ignorant of the cartel? It was quite easy to guess what you would do,  _Monsieur_ Turnbull—though I am quite sure that is not your name."

"Come now," said Jack, limping forward with hands raised, "there is no need to gloat, young fellow. Stephen," he murmured, "I hope you are ready to run."

It was perhaps the most magnificently stupid thing Stephen had ever witnessed, the injured and weary bulk of Captain Aubrey lunging suddenly forward into the pistol's path and taking hold of the horseman by his heel. Nelson, who had never minded the manoeuvres, would certainly have approved. There was a shot, and Stephen's blood ran cold; he was hurrying forward before he knew what he was doing. A great commotion of hooves, a piercing whinny, and then the young man lay unmoving on the ground. 

The panicked horse galloped back across the dunes, and Jack leaned over with his hands braced on his knees, panting. "Is he knocked on the head, Stephen?" he asked with childlike apprehension, and Stephen felt another surge of pity and regret, though more for his friend or for the Frenchman, he didn't know. He placed his fingers on the man's neck.

"He lives," he said curtly. "We must get away from here at once; his colleague will be nearby, on the road perhaps. We must flee down the beach."

"Trapped between the road and the sea," said Jack, without bitterness. "Come, give me your hand, and we shall be off."

Together they hobbled down the beach, loping awkwardly like some great, misproportioned beast, and while Stephen listened for hoofbeats, he heard only the pounding of waves. At last they passed under the shadow of Cape Blanc Nez, and Jack's leg gave out abruptly and for good; so they crouched in one of the indentations in the crumbling white cliffs, shielded somewhat against the wind blowing cold fog onshore.

"I think perhaps we have reached our limit," said Stephen, pressing himself without shame against the sheltering mass of his friend. 

"I think perhaps we have. I am terribly sorry, Stephen, if it weren't for this damned ankle—"

"No, no," said Stephen, shaking his head angrily, "I won't hear it. It is I who must be blamed for our circumstances—and I say so not out of self-pity, which I abhor, but simply to acknowledge the facts. It was outrageously ill-advised of you to charge that pistol, by the way. I have never seen anything like it."

Jack laughed, a shockingly rich sound amid their cold wet stone surroundings. "A man with a pistol rarely expects you to run straight at him, I find. Stephen, am I right to believe that if we are captured and discovered to be ourselves, you will be shot as a spy?"

"It is a distinct possibility," Stephen replied.

"That is why it seemed worthwhile to risk that fellow's pistol," said Jack.

Stephen sighed and huddled closer. His inhibitions were quite gone, and Jack was exceptionally warm. "Incidentally, if you were thinking of asking: no, I will not abandon you here and continue on my own."

"I had gathered as much." Jack laughed again, giddy with pain and the proximity of death. "I had considered asking, of course, but you are far too honourable for all that."

Stephen pressed his lips to Jack's temple; and then to his mouth, for Jack had turned his head. All was dreamlike and slow, all reduced to sensation; despite his despair, all seemed right. Then he heard the sound of voices.

_Long we've tossed on the rolling main  
Now we're safe ashore, Jack..._

Still cleaving tightly to his friend, Stephen turned his head and looked out to sea, where through the fog, he saw the outline of a longboat pulling parallel to the shore.

Jack stirred and frowned. "Am I going mad, Stephen, or do you hear Barrett Bonden singing somewhere nearby?"

"I think perhaps you are right," Stephen replied, and smiled.

*

At the head of the table, Jack devoured his dinner with deep and affectionate appreciation, the sort that came only after hardship. His cook had made him a spotted dog, and nothing had ever tasted quite so fine. When the heat of his reunion with food had cooled somewhat, he called out, "A glass of wine with you, Mr Gillespie."

Gillespie accepted his toast with gusto. "To your health, sir, and your heroism. We are most heartily glad to have regained you."

"It was all on account of the gentlemen's compass that we managed it, sir," said Pullings to his right. "A most uncommon fine instrument; we'd never have ventured so close to the coast without it."

"Bah, compasses," muttered Stephen. "They are as dangerous as will-o'-the-wisps. How following that lying instrument has ever led to a man's reaching his destination, I cannot fathom."

"True, Doctor, it is not simply a matter of following where the needle points," said Mr Turnbull across the table with a degree of umbrage. "But truth can be coaxed from the poor thing, if you possess the proper knowledge."

Later, as Jack and Stephen traded a theme by Corelli back and forth, Stephen suddenly paused with his bow on his 'cello and said, "I must beg your pardon for my behaviour earlier. I do not think I was entirely in my right mind."

Jack strongly suspected what Stephen was alluding to. In the quieter moments since their rescue, he had dwelled on it himself, and found that he was curiously unopposed to what had happened. Never in his life had he found his tastes tending that way, but the sense of wrongness he had expected was not there. After all, Turnbull and Gillespie were capital fellows and not at all what one imagined sodomites to be. Nevertheless, it was probably for the best if what had passed between Stephen and himself remained of a piece with their strange adventure and nothing else. "It is no matter, Stephen, no matter at all," he said mildly. "Think not of it." He would, perhaps, think of it himself from time to time, in the manner of a particularly vivid dream that lingered well into the day, but he would not let it trouble him, as indeed few things did. He returned his bow to his string. "Now—from the beginning."


End file.
